Tuesday, May 23, 2006

With implacably bad timing, Bill Leak yesterday wrote of ever-easier Mt Everest “firsts”. Leak’s timing was so awry because a few hours later, details emerged of a climber’s particularly awful death high up on Everest.

I’ll cut to the chase: 34-year-old David Sharp’s life may well have been unsaveable when the 47-year-old Mark Inglis’s party encountered him. And, by taking below-recommended amounts of oxygen with him, and climbing Everest more or less alone (isn’t there an all-purpose motherly maxim against such?), Sharp must have understood he was taking a large risk with his own life, and so therefore carry sole responsibility for his own death.

But equally, surely Mark Inglis’s party could have done something for David Sharp, without in any way risking their own lives? That "something" admittedly would have probably stopped their successful summiting (Inglis et al were on their way up when they encountered the prone Sharp (who was descending after successfully summiting, FWIW)). At the very least, two of them (for safety) should have stayed with Sharp for (i) as long as he was conscious, providing that (ii) they were not risking their own (/party's) safety by so doing.

Not that doing such would have saved his life, of course. But Holy Fucking Christ, what must have been going through the poor man’s mind, as 40 (!) people walked past his obviously-stricken form, admittedly some of them taking a moderate interest in his health, sufficient for them to stop briefly, radio back to base for advice – and then push on up, leaving David Sharp to die alone (AFAICT).

I’m not sure if David Sharp’s being an Xer, and the others (Mark Inglis, at least) being boomers has anything to do with it. In any case, the Most Callous Thing Said or Done Award for the whole tragedy seems to belong with David Sharp’s mum:

Possibly, she might disagree with me that helping her son not to die alone would have been a good thing; more likely, she just hasn’t considered it. Then again, given that her son so willfully defied the ancient maternal injunction about not doing things alone (as well as probably not having changed into clean underpants that morning, to boot), maybe she thinks that he just got what he deserved; an awful, lonely death with only a shrill voice inside his head for company.

Now back in New Zealand, Mark Inglis has objected to being singled out over David Sharp’s dying alone. (I’ve already said that I don’t believe that Sharp’s life could have been saved, although I am starting to have second thoughts, below)

Yuk – what a scum-sucking piece of boomer low-life. US$8,000 is a “pittance”: yeah, right. The obvious implication is that Inglis, because he could afford to, did a “gold class” Everest climb, and that Sharp was a mere gate-crasher into his cozy club.

But it gets better, in terms of some remarkable differences in the detailed versions of what happened, as told by Inglis vs Australian “businessman” Bob Killip (at 52, also a boomer and also presumably rich)

Ah, the Sherpa did it! But in fairness to Inglis, this account seems over-embellished with personal guilt/regret; even in doing “nothing”, he still at least stopped and radioed back to base (per above post).

Now, I accept that, high up on Everest at 2am, it is presumably easy to mistake a living person for a frozen corpse, especially as one stumbles half-asleep up to the summit, knowing that if one doesn’t get back to camp the next night, death is the almost certain outcome.

But obviously, Sharp can’t have been that close to death as the Inglis/Killip team passed him on the way up, for he was visibly alive about 16 hours later (I’m guessing) as the team came back down.

So which is it, guys? The pushy Sherpa, or the old Polish corpse-decoy trick? Apart from their inconsistency, both versions share a curious trait, in that Sharp’s life was very nearly, almost saveable. That is, if it wasn’t for those pesky Sherpas and/or dead Poles . . .